"Which
are the new types of struggles, those that are more
transversal and immediate than centralizing and
mediating? Which are the new functions of the more 'specific'
than universal intellectual? Which are the new ways of
subjectivation, more free of identity than identifying?"[1]

With
loose references to the struggles in and around Paris
May 1968, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault and Gilles
Deleuze posed similar questions in different (con)texts
and sketched out suggestions of a concept of transversality.
These traces, which are less theoretically constructed
than directly and explicitly embedded in the political
context around 1968, are to be addressed here. Our intention
is not necessarily to establish connections to general
issues of cultural and identity politics, such as those
that resurfaced in English under the term "transversal
politics"[2]
in the late nineties, nor to carry on Wolfgang Welsch's[3]
considerations based on a critique of reason, nor the
faded allusions, with which the concept of the transversal
corresponds to French everyday language, and certainly
not to recall memories of geometry lessons.[4]

The
minimal definition, the minimal development of the concept
by Deleuze and cohorts, the casual use as an auxiliary
term in their landscape of concepts, is not a lack,
but rather opens up an opportunity, in that transversality
becomes available for being newly charged in globalization-critical
contexts. Transversality, not at all in a metaphorical
sense, is intended here to contribute to shifting the
discussion from the definitory to the contextually organizing,
from the whether to the how of the movement. In our
case, the whether is found mainly in the question of
whether the counterpart of economic globalization, its
themes, its dissemination and its manifestations, is
also to be understood and termed as global or not. In
terms of concepts, this is expressed primarily in the
argument about whether this involves anti-globalization,
anti-globalism, or rather a "different" globalization,
a "grassroots globalization", so to speak.

The
concept of transversality subverts this not overly effective
question. The global development of the transversal
multitude is, in any case, hardly to be understood as
a status quo, but rather as a constantly changing perspective;
yet what is more desirable than any notion of the world
ultimately being completely covered by Empire and/or
Multitude[5],
is the insistence on movement, on becoming, on becoming
revolutionary. Transversality reinforces the concepts
of this tendency toward unclosable movement and implies
its formal and organizational quality. What are the
components of the concept, though, and how does transversality
occur concretely in the movement?

transnational:
overcoming the multinational building-block set

To
put it quite simply and in Foucault's words, transversal
struggles are not limited to one certain country, so
they are transnational.[6]
This sounds entirely reasonable and seems to suggest
a practice that has long since become commonplace anyway,
but that is not the case. Transnational cooperation
is still an ace in the hand of the world of capital,
not a matter of common sense, not a form of collaboration
open to everyone, not a widely tested praxis of resistance.
The Austrian example of resistance against the black-blue
government (i.e. the coalition between the conservative
Austrian People's Party - symbolized with the color
black - and the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria
- symbolized with the color blue) in 1999/2000 shows
- just like innumerable other, more current hotspots
of resistance against right-wing populist and radical
right-wing parties in Europe - that many actors, even
if they take a fundamentally anti-national position
themselves, remain more or less trapped in their structural
localisms and nationalisms. In the discussions around
"February Zero"[7]
(February 2000, when the "black-blue" coalition
government was formed in Austria), there were arguments
about a "different", "better", "actual"
Austria; at
the relevant demonstrations, left-wing patriots celebrated
with their equally patriotic friends from France or
Belgium, and representatives of the "other"
Austria ultimately marketed themselves as typical Austrian
resistance and exported themselves abroad, to panels,
conferences and front pages. What took place in the
process was by no means a transnational transversalization;
no intensive debates arose between the scenes and on
the various traditions of power and resistance in the
various countries. Instead, the opportunity of transversality
got lost in multinational parallel actions, as these
were carried out alongside one another without exchange.

Even
the proliferation of counter-summits, the protests against
the G8, WEF, WTO summits, the summit hopping from Seattle
1999 to Genoa 2001 (and beyond) remains a superficial
phenomenon in this image of a hardly cohesive patchwork
of resistance, which by itself could be understood as
an effect of general societal spectacularization. It
is only against the backdrop of growing continuous
activities that the anti-globalist large-scale demonstration
becomes an occurrence that briefly breaks through this
continuity and gives it new directions. In between such
spectacular jet flames, nomadic practices of wandering
caravan artists, for instance, indicate a transversalization
within and in the framework of protests against economic
globalization by attempting to fill the gaps between
the major events with expansion experiments at the various
borders.[8]
Although the transnational praxis of the Noborder network
and the border camps repeat some of the problems of
political organizing[9],
it is still a strong indication of the extent to which
particularly younger activists seek non-reformist and
non-representationist approaches to self-organization.[10]Overcoming
the multinational building-block set emerges most strikingly
in the rare situations, when migrants and self-organized
migrant groups enter the scenes of activism as protagonists,
exploding the national framework, as it were, from the
inside, as they also draw one
line of protest against economic globalization: a line
that can be traced at least since 2001, for instance
in the election campaign actions of the "Wiener
Wahl Partie"[11]
or in Genoa at the "Migrants' International March"
in conjunction with the manifestations against the G8
summit.[12]

transsectoral:
a praxis of traversing social fields

As
the precarious practices of the Noborder network, the
border camps and caravans work to overcome national
frameworks, their transversal lines also break through
the hermetic of particularist partial public spheres
and exclusive subcultures. This means something substantially
more than and different from the stale terminology of
interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity and the practices
that have academized this concept. In the field of art,
for instance, it no longer means the dissolution of
the boundaries of disciplines in the diverse practices
between happenings and performances, but rather cooperations
between artists, theoreticians, activists, etc. all
across the different fields. As transversal lines tend
to transsectorally cross through several fields, they
link together social struggles and artistic interventions
and theory production and ... This AND is not to be
understood as haphazardly stringing together random
elements to cover up contradictions, as a political
propaganda display of social fields, but rather as a
multitude of temporary alliances, as a productive concatenation
of what never fits together smoothly, what is constantly
in friction and impelled by this friction or caused
to evaporate again.[13]
At the same time, this AND resists merging into a large
unified front and against splintering, portioning and
fractioning.[14]
In other words, it does not work like the gluttonous
inclusion mechanism, which generates a freedom from
contradictions in the insatiable apparatuses of political
parties through imperatives of conformity, nor in the
style of the mainstream of attac,
as a hybrid of Greenpeace and unions, greedy for members
on the one hand, but on the other very clever in founding
sections. The division of the movement into economic
policy, agricultural, artistic, feminist, etc. "sub-unions",
the limiting of respective specific competencies to
the clichés of their subsectors (for instance, the [self-]
limitation of artists to illustrations or recruiting
celebrities) are exactly the opposite of the additive
function of transversality. Contrary to the principle
of delegation according to a division of labor, transversal
lines pose a praxis of traversing. Contrary to the old
strategies of networking, fragmenting and unifying,
the concatenation of diversity needs neither fragmentation
nor consensus, at most a constantly renewed differentiation
between power and resistance.

molecular:
multitude and non-conformist mass

In
the seventies, Deleuze and Guattari asked how the capitalist
system's repressive concatenations of wishes, the restraining
politics holding back the creativity, the wish production
and the initiative of the masses could be overcome,
without replacing it with equally repressive concatenations
of wishes of a bureaucratic system, without instrumentalizing
the wish energy of the masses for fascist(self-) destruction. What they are searching
for are events and places, where the "notion of mass is a molecular notion operating according to a type
of segmentation irreducible to the molar segmentarity
of class."[15]
The significance of the search for these kinds of non-molar
concepts of mass and crowd, as well as the concomitant
phenomena in the movements grows with increasing deterritorialization
and the prevailing of post-fordist working conditions
and forms of cooperation. When everyone, even the most
conservative organizations remodel themselves from hierarchies
into "decentralized networks", then the condition
of distinguishing the organizational forms of Empire
and Multitude, of power and resistance, of constituted
power and constituent power, becomes the most important
question.

Contrary
to openly hierarchical networks and pseudo-non-hierarchical
networks, which also seek to cover up hierarchies as
poly-centric
networks, transversal lines develop structures that
are a-centric, that do not move only on the basis of given strands and
channels, never from one point to another, always right
through, in between the points, in a completely different
direction. In other words, transversals are not at all
connections between multiple centers or points; they
are lines that do not necessarily even cross anywhere,
lines of flight, fault lines, continuously eluding the
systems of points and their coordinates.

The
notion of connecting already existent points corresponds,
albeit covertly, to the structure of hierarchical, molar
systems. In comparison, the a-central forms of organization
and linkages of transversal protests work with temporary
overlappings and superimpositions that are based on
a flowing political organization with an open end. Suitable
metamorphous vessels are needed for these overlaps,
the development of which changes in more cadre-like,
closed forms or open labels, depending on the situation.
The transformations of these vessels of organization
and communication must specifically take the manifoldness
of the multitude into account; the multitude less as
a "Menge"[16]
(crowd) than as a "non-conforming mass: non-conforming
as an incomprehensible totality in their stance against
[...] state power, non-conforming in their rejection
of uniformization, in their insistence on the difference
of individuals"[17],
and yet still regaining their capacity for community
in the midst of difference capitalism and competitive
individualism: the cancellation of mass and individual
in the non-conforming mass of protests is one in which
both poles tendentially retain their full significance,
without being resolved in something more sublime in
keeping with the pattern of dialectic.

specific:
new modes of subjectivation

"The
intellectuals to come will not be individuals, not a
caste, but rather a collective concatenation, in which
people are involved, who do manual work, intellectual
work, artistic work."[18]
The intellectuals to come, as Guattari describes them
here, do not correspond to the commonplace images of
intellectuals now thirty years later either; on the
contrary, the type of the "media intellectual"
and his function of giving a spectacle-like and depoliticized
commentary on anything and everything have increasingly
prevailed.[19]
And yet primarily the collective experiences of several
generations have again and again produced new, alternative
notions of linking competencies and knowledge: transversal
struggles generate specific modes of subjectivation,
require specific competencies, demand specific potentials,
rather than the universal of a universal proletariat
or the "universal intellectual". In a certain
way, the concept of transversality has become the counter-pole
of a totalizing concept of universality in this respect.
Deleuze picks up on Foucault's understanding of the
attribution of the universal particularly to the changing
status of the intellectual, who

"for
a long period of time from the 18th century to the end
of World War II (through Zola, Rolland ... perhaps even
to Sartre) has been able to assume the role of the administrator
of the general: to the extent that the uniqueness of
the writer correlated to the position of the 'jurist
or notable', the 'man of justice, the man of law', who
counterposes all the abuses of power and wealth with
'the universality of justice and the equity of an ideal
law'. If the intellectual (and also the function of
writing) has taken on a different shape today, then
it is because his position itself has changed and now
runs more from one certain location to another, from
a singular point to the next, if he is a 'nuclear physicist,
geneticist, computer scientist, pharmacologist ...'
and thus now achieves effects of transversality rather
than universality, or functions as a preferred relay
or intersection point. In this sense, the intellectual
or even the writer (this is no more than one possibility)
can all the better take part in the struggles, in current
resistance, as they have become 'transversal'."[20]

In
the deposition of the hermetic autonomy of ivory tower
artists and exemplary intellectuals, transversality
first emerges in the linking or superimposition of specific
competencies. This model primarily has the advantage
that transversal modes of subjectivation can be imagined
beyond the position of intellectuals: intellectuals
no longer have a monopoly function in explaining and
championing the world. These functions are diffused
or even become unusable in contexts, in which specific
competencies are interlayered in collective and a-centric
networks.

Transversality
thus ultimately also implies a precondition for evolving
new forms of collectivity, or rather: for dissolving
the opposition between the individual and the collective.
There is no longer any artificially produced subject
of articulation; it becomes clear that every name, every
linkage, every label has always already been collective
and must be newly constructed over and over again. In
particular, to the same extent to which transversal
collectives are only to be understood as polyvocal groups,
transversality is linked with a critique of representation,
with a refusal to speak for others, in the name of others,
with abandoning identity, with a loss of a unified face,
with the subversion of the social pressure to produce
faces.

[14]
In
contrast, cf. Hito Steyerl, The Articulation of
Protest (http://www.republicart.net/disc/mundial/steyerl02_en.htm)
and in contrast to this: Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations,
New York 1995, S.44/45: "Neither a component
nor a collection, what is this AND? I think Godard's
force lies in living and thinking and presenting
this AND in a very novel way, and in making it work
actively. AND is neither one thing nor the other,
it's always in-between, between two things; it's
the borderline, there's always a border, a line
of flight or flow, only we don't see it, because
it's the least perceptible of things. And yet it's
along this line of flight that things come to pass,
becomings evolve, revolutions take shape..."